One of the grandest old men of American letters, now
in his sixty-ninth year, shows no sign of flagging
in his unceasing productivity. Since his fiction debut
in 1959 with The Poorhouse Fair, over eighteen novels
and eleven short story collections, he has been perhaps
the most consistent chronicler of the foibles and
failings, lovings and longings, blasted hopes and
broken dreams, of middle class, increasingly middle-aged,
Middle America.
His new book contains twelve stories, and a novella
length sequel to his quartet of novels about Harry
‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, entitled Rabbit
Remembered. The stories are almost uniformly
nostalgic in tone, recalling old loves and past scenes
from a perspective of age. Indeed, one is simply titled
‘Scenes from the Fifties’. They are not
all completely successful. ‘My Father on the
Verge of Disgrace’ and ‘The Cats’
are long and rambling, and in their meanderings seem
to lack necessary focus and tension. Likewise, no
matter what first person narrative voice Updike adopts,
they all enjoy a daunting facility with language,
in which they revel, but that can in turn undercut
the believability, if the character is not a writer
who would share his creator’s extraordinary
way with words.

However, when he hits top form, and
the tone matches the character, as in ‘New York
Girl’ or the title story, ‘Licks of Love
in the Heart of the Cold War’, there is considerable
pleasure to be had in letting his measured, honed style
and his wry, worldly tone wash over you. In the former,
a man from Buffalo recollects his extramarital affair
with a gallery worker, while on business trips to New
York, selling picture frames manufactured by his engineering
company. ‘Once you were in New York, you were
on another planet, a far shore; it cried out for you
to establish another life.’, and ‘It was
a revelation to me, this wee-hour camaraderie of New
Yorkers, and the city’s genial way of folding
my adultery into its round-the-clock hustle.’
Redolent of the milieu of Billy Wilder’s 1960
film The Apartment, it is extremely well-written.
The latter is about an American banjo virtuoso, demonstrating
his licks to an enthralled Soviet audience while touring
as Cultural Ambassador under Khrushchev’s more
open regime, while being hounded by letters from his
home country in the aftermath of a one-night stand in
Washington, DC.
In ‘His Oeuvre’, another old Updike character,
the writer Bech, encounters the phenomenon of women
he has slept with years ago turning up at his book readings.
‘These women who showed up at his readings did
it, it seemed clear, to mock his books - clever, twisted,
false books, empty of almost all that mattered, these
women he had slept with were saying. We, we
are your masterpieces.’
Most of the stories have a present day denouement, usually
with the characters meeting up again, accidentally.
It is noteworthy how often this happens in malls.
It is the novella, in which Rabbit’s survivors
- wife, lovers, son, friends - entertain his memory
while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of
the millennium, which is most engaging, providing as
it does a compelling snapshot of contemporary America.
This includes the rise of therapy culture and information
technology, and features an extended family Thanksgiving
dinner scene, where an argument about the Clintons causes
friction. This is reminiscent of the Christmas dinner
scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, where similar tensions were raised
by a discussion of Parnell.
Updike is, of course, the doyen of suburban adultery,
and this means he may be curiously relevant to Ireland
right now, since the modernising Nineties here in many
ways paralleled Sixties America, with the consequent
spread of sexual freedom. However, depending on how
interested you are in who’s shagging who, sometimes
you long for the more astringent and compendious vision
of a Thomas Pynchon, a Don DeLillo, or a David Foster
Wallace. The latter’s Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men is a blistering series of satires on
the intellectual vacuity and self-serving character
of the contemporary culture of therapy, more biting
and on the money than one will find in Updike. There
is a certain lack of imagination and cosiness with Updike
that can become predictable and a trifle rich. Still,
his deftness with spinning a story, or a line, when
he’s not cruising lazily in auto-pilot, is remarkably
seductive, and can be recommended.